Michael Lind: How Liberalism Can Survive the Collapse of Union Power
[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."]
In last week’s column, I argued that, because unions are likely to play an even smaller role in American politics and policy than they do today, progressives must come up with other strategies for mobilizing ordinary workers and voters to achieve goals like higher wages and a comprehensive system of social insurance. In a response published at Salon, Matthew Dimick of Georgetown University argues that "a liberalism without labor in a nation of staggering levels of economic inequality is even more unlikely."...
While the top of the labor market in the U.S. has blown off, the bottom has fallen out at the same time. The decline of labor unions is one factor -- but again, only one. Another factor has been mass immigration. With a few exceptions, like the late Barbara Jordan, most liberals refuse to admit that mass immigration by disproportionately poor and uneducated workers in the last generation has had anything to do with reducing wages for janitors, construction workers and nursing home aides. The taboo that prevents discussion of this factor among progressives arises from the fact that Democratic activists, having written off the white working class, hope to import enough Latino voters to create a Democratic majority in the next decade or two. Whatever the merits of that as a political strategy, it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that flooding the low-end labor market with unskilled immigrant workers has not weakened the bargaining power of America's least powerful workers.
Indeed, it is questionable whether high levels of private-sector union membership and mass immigration are compatible. As the eminent historian of labor Vernon W. Briggs has pointed out, the high point of unionization in America coincided with the low point of immigration, between the cut-off of mass immigration in the 1920s and its resumption in the 1970s. Mass immigration can harm unionization in two ways: directly, by providing an ever-growing pool of non-union "scabs" to replace workers who seek to unionize, and indirectly, by increasing divisions among workers along non-economic lines that increase the difficulty of collaboration. For two decades now, some utopian progressives have claimed that it is possible to reconcile mass immigration with increased unionization by unionizing both natives and immigrants. In theory anything is possible but in practice private sector union membership has continued to crumble in the face of mass immigration....
Fortunately, we do not need to wait for an unlikely renaissance of trade unionism in America in order to address the causes of rising inequality -- causes like the deregulation of finance, excessive CEO compensation, and a loose labor market at the bottom. Reducing pretax inequality is not rocket science. We know how to do it. Turning finance into a tightly regulated utility again, and refusing to bail out overleveraged gambling houses on Wall Street, would dry up much of the pretax income of the financial elite. Reforms of corporate board structure and compensation could reduce CEO pay to the levels found in other industrial democracies. And ending mass immigration by the unskilled, in favor of a points system that favors educated immigrants, could put upward pressure on the wages of the working poor, by creating a tighter labor market....
Read entire article at Salon
In last week’s column, I argued that, because unions are likely to play an even smaller role in American politics and policy than they do today, progressives must come up with other strategies for mobilizing ordinary workers and voters to achieve goals like higher wages and a comprehensive system of social insurance. In a response published at Salon, Matthew Dimick of Georgetown University argues that "a liberalism without labor in a nation of staggering levels of economic inequality is even more unlikely."...
While the top of the labor market in the U.S. has blown off, the bottom has fallen out at the same time. The decline of labor unions is one factor -- but again, only one. Another factor has been mass immigration. With a few exceptions, like the late Barbara Jordan, most liberals refuse to admit that mass immigration by disproportionately poor and uneducated workers in the last generation has had anything to do with reducing wages for janitors, construction workers and nursing home aides. The taboo that prevents discussion of this factor among progressives arises from the fact that Democratic activists, having written off the white working class, hope to import enough Latino voters to create a Democratic majority in the next decade or two. Whatever the merits of that as a political strategy, it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that flooding the low-end labor market with unskilled immigrant workers has not weakened the bargaining power of America's least powerful workers.
Indeed, it is questionable whether high levels of private-sector union membership and mass immigration are compatible. As the eminent historian of labor Vernon W. Briggs has pointed out, the high point of unionization in America coincided with the low point of immigration, between the cut-off of mass immigration in the 1920s and its resumption in the 1970s. Mass immigration can harm unionization in two ways: directly, by providing an ever-growing pool of non-union "scabs" to replace workers who seek to unionize, and indirectly, by increasing divisions among workers along non-economic lines that increase the difficulty of collaboration. For two decades now, some utopian progressives have claimed that it is possible to reconcile mass immigration with increased unionization by unionizing both natives and immigrants. In theory anything is possible but in practice private sector union membership has continued to crumble in the face of mass immigration....
Fortunately, we do not need to wait for an unlikely renaissance of trade unionism in America in order to address the causes of rising inequality -- causes like the deregulation of finance, excessive CEO compensation, and a loose labor market at the bottom. Reducing pretax inequality is not rocket science. We know how to do it. Turning finance into a tightly regulated utility again, and refusing to bail out overleveraged gambling houses on Wall Street, would dry up much of the pretax income of the financial elite. Reforms of corporate board structure and compensation could reduce CEO pay to the levels found in other industrial democracies. And ending mass immigration by the unskilled, in favor of a points system that favors educated immigrants, could put upward pressure on the wages of the working poor, by creating a tighter labor market....